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The scourge of DRM

And, “It is one of the company’s highest priorities,” said a Reuters headline.

“We just reviewed that (issue) about an hour ago,” Schmidt promised Reuters after being asked what Google was doing to make so-called anti-piracy technologies widely available to video owners.

“It is going to roll out very soon … It is not far away.”

That was back in 2007. But never mind, eh? He was set to deliver at the end of 2010 following an official Google announcement that it’d bought Widevine, which officially specialises in DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) consumer control and, “Google has bought DRM software outfit Widevine for an undisclosed sum, said the Register 2010.

It’s absolutely amazing that a company can survive selling this kind of stuff. It’s the same as flogging a dead horse.

As has been pointed out by so many, so many times before, anything — anything — which can be seen and or heard can be copied by one digital or analog means or another. It’s that simple.

“You cannot stop a determined individual from making a freely copyable version of anything digital unless you ban all output devices (certainly would make Haskell programming nicer) and burn every camera and piece of audio equipment ever built.

And Digital files cannot be made uncopyable any more than water can be made not wet, as Bruce Schneier once said.

But with the greedy, unscrupulous Big Music and Hollywood cartels lining up to rip off their customers in one way or another, there’s always a market for alleged ‘copyright protection’.

Gargle is a past master at presenting the odious as desirable and on its official blog gurgles, “Content creators and distributors are making huge strides in bringing us content … but to do so, many require high-quality video and audio, secure delivery, and other content protection and video optimization technologies.”

Yep. And “With these tools in place they can easily and effectively give you access to the rich library of content you want to watch, with the immediacy you’ve come to expect”, it states.

Pull the other one. It has bells on it.

“So we’re pleased to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire Widevine”, says Google, adding, “We are committed to maintaining Widevine’s agreements and will provide direct, quality support for their existing and future clients — and we plan to build upon Widevine’s technology to enhance both their products and our own. We’re excited to welcome the Widevine team to Google, and together we’ll work to improve access to great video content across the web.”